Understanding Zencity Benchmarking

Zencity Benchmarking helps you understand how your community's survey results compare to similar communities and national averages. This feature provides context for your data by showing where you stand relative to peer communities with comparable demographics, population size, and characteristics.

Currently, benchmarking is available for U.S. clients only.

When to use it: After each survey cycle to contextualize your results and identify areas of strength or improvement.

Available for: Community Survey and Blockwise clients using Zencity standard questions.

Why Benchmarking Matters

Understanding your survey results in isolation only tells part of the story. Zencity Benchmarking transforms your data from standalone numbers into strategic intelligence by providing meaningful context and comparison.

The Power of Contextual Comparison

When you see that 65% of residents feel safe in your community, the critical questions are: Is this good? Are we improving? How do we compare to similar places facing comparable challenges?

Benchmarking answers these questions by:

• Revealing relative performance - A 65% safety score might be excellent for an urban area but concerning for a suburban community
• Identifying true improvement opportunities - Focus efforts where you're genuinely underperforming peers, not just areas with lower absolute scores
• Validating success stories - Confidently highlight areas where you outperform similar communities
• Tracking meaningful progress - See whether you're improving faster or slower than communities like yours

Accessing Your Benchmark Data

To view your benchmark data:

1. Navigate to your Community Survey or Blockwise dashboard
2. Click the Benchmarking tab in the navigation
3. Use the Cycle Filter to select which survey cycle you want to view (defaults to your latest cycle)

Your benchmarking data updates quarterly with each new benchmark survey cycle.

Understanding Your Benchmark Scores

Score Types

For each standard Zencity survey question that's also included in our benchmark survey, you'll see three key scores:

• Your Score - Your community's weighted score for the question
• Cohort Score - The average weighted score from communities similar to yours, weighted to your community's census data to reflect your community's makeup
• National Score - The average weighted score from a nationally representative sample, weighted against the national U.S. census

Interpreting the Comparison

When comparing scores, focus on the difference between your score and the cohort score, as this shows how you perform relative to communities most like yours. The national score provides additional context for broader comparison.

Gap indicators show whether you're performing above or below your cohort average, helping you quickly identify standout areas.

How We Create Your Benchmark Scores

Zencity conducts quarterly national benchmark surveys across the United States, collecting at least 5,000 responses in a targeted, proportional manner from communities nationwide. This ensures comprehensive geographic and demographic coverage across the country.

To ensure robust sample sizes, benchmark scores aggregate data from the most recent two survey cycles, providing even greater statistical reliability.

Your benchmark scores are created from this national dataset:

• National scores are calculated using all responses from this national survey, weighted to represent the U.S. population
• Cohort scores are calculated using only the responses from communities in your specific peer group

How We Create Your Cohort

Creating the cohorts

No two communities are exactly alike, so we use a wide range of geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic factors to build custom benchmark cohorts for each Zencity client. 

We identify a set of the most similar communities in the country, then select a cohort of respondents from those communities from our nationally representative benchmark survey. This creates a custom comparison group that reflects a broad group (covering about 10% of the country’s population in total) that shares aspects of geography, size, and demographic makeup. 

This method balances a range of different characteristics to put communities into cohorts that are statistically similar on average, yet capture voices from a diverse range of local contexts. 

We chose this method to create objectively similar groups of communities with respect to characteristics that are likely to be correlated with answers to the survey questions. 

By creating cohorts of larger sets of communities we have found that our benchmark baselines tend to be more reliable than they would be if we had direct comparisons of a small number of communities.

What Questions Get Benchmarked

Benchmarking works based on question compatibility between your survey and our national benchmark survey. Questions in your survey that match questions in our benchmark survey will show benchmark scores.

Questions unique to your survey or significantly modified from standard templates may not have benchmark data available.

Viewing Your Results

Performance Summary

The main benchmarking view shows a table comparing your performance across all benchmarked questions, with:

• Your Score vs Cohort Score vs National Score
• Gap indicators showing whether you're above or below benchmark

Trend Analysis

Click on any question to see how your scores and benchmark scores have changed over time, helping you track whether you're improving faster or slower than similar communities.

Using Benchmark Data Strategically

For Decision-Making:

• Identify areas where you significantly outperform or underperform peers
• Prioritize improvement efforts based on gaps from similar communities
• Validate that changes in scores represent genuine progress relative to peers

For Communication:

• Contextualize your performance in reports and briefings
• Highlight areas of relative strength compared to similar communities
• Frame challenges within the context of peer community performance

Remember that benchmark comparisons show relative performance - they help you understand where you stand compared to communities like yours, not absolute measures of success.